Shut Your Eyes Tight by John Verdon pptx

Dave Gurney stood just inside the French doors of his farm- style kitchen, looking out over the garden and the mowed lawn that sepa-rated the big house from the overgrown pasture that sl

This is a work of fi ction Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fi ctitiously Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

Copyright © 2011 by John Verdon

All rights reserved

Published in the United States by Crown Publishers,

an imprint of the Crown Publishing Group,

a division of Random House, Inc., New York.

www.crownpublishing.com

CROWN and the Crown colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Verdon, John.

Shut your eyes tight / by John Verdon.—1st ed.

p cm.

1 Detectives—New York (State)—New York—Fiction I Title.

PS3622.E736S57 2011 813'.6—dc22 2010053589

ISBN 978-0-307-71789-4 eISBN 978-0-307-71791-7

Printed in the United States of America

Book design by Lynne Amft Jacket design by Superfantastic

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

First Edition

He stood in front of the mirror and smiled with deep satisfaction at his

own smiling refl ection He could not at that moment have been more

pleased with himself, with his life, with his intelligence—no, it was

more than that, more than mere intelligence His mental status could

more accurately be described as a profound understanding of

every-thing That was precisely what it was—a profound understanding of

everything, an understanding that went far beyond the normal range

of human wisdom He watched the smile on his face in the mirror

stretching wider at the aptness of the phrase, which he had italicized

in his mind as he thought it Internally he could feel—literally feel—

the power of his insight into all things human Externally, the course

of events was proof of it.

First of all, to put it in the simplest terms, he had not been caught

Almost twenty- four hours had passed, almost to the minute now, and

in that nearly complete revolution of the earth he had only grown

safer But that was predictable; he had taken care to ensure that there

would be no trail to follow, no logic that could lead anyone to him And

in fact no one had come No one had found him out Therefore it was

reasonable to conclude that his elimination of the presumptuous bitch

had been a success in every way.

Everything had gone according to plan, smoothly, conclusively—

yes, conclusively was an excellent word for it Everything occurred as

anticipated, no stumbles, no surprises except for that sound

Carti-lage? Must have been What else?

Such a minor thing, it made no sense that it would create such a lasting sensory impression But perhaps the strength, the durability

P r o l o g u e

The perfect solution

J O H N V E R D O N

2

of the impression was simply the natural product of his preternatural

sensitivity Acuteness had its price.

Surely that snickety little crunch would one day be as faint in his

memory as the image of all that blood, which was already beginning

to fade It was important to keep things in perspective, to remember

that all things pass Every ripple in the pond eventually subsides.

P a r t O n e

The Mexican

Gardener

There was a stillness in the September- morning air that was

like the stillness in the heart of a gliding submarine, en-gines extinguished to elude the enemy’s listening devices

The whole landscape was held motionless in the invisible grip of a

vast calm, the calm before a storm, a calm as deep and unpredictable

as the ocean

slowly draining the life out of the grass and trees Now the leaves

were fading from green to tan and had already begun to drop

si-lently from the branches of the maples and beeches, offering little

prospect of a colorful autumn

Dave Gurney stood just inside the French doors of his farm- style kitchen, looking out over the garden and the mowed lawn that

sepa-rated the big house from the overgrown pasture that sloped down to

the pond and the old red barn He was vaguely uncomfortable and

unfocused, his attention drifting between the asparagus patch at the

end of the garden and the small yellow bulldozer beside the barn

He sipped sourly at his morning coffee, which was losing its warmth

in the dry air

To manure or not to manure—that was the asparagus question

Or at least it was the fi rst question If the answer turned out to be

yes, that would raise a second question: bulk or bagged? Fertilizer, he

had been informed by various websites to which he’d been directed

by Madeleine, was the key to success with asparagus, but whether

he needed to supplement last spring’s application with a fresh load

now was not entirely clear

C h a p t e r 1

Life in the country

J O H N V E R D O N

6

He’d been trying, at least halfheartedly, for their two years in

is-sues that Madeleine had taken up with instant enthusiasm, but

al-ways nibbling at his efforts were the disturbing termites of buyer’s

remorse—remorse not so much at the purchase of that specifi c

house on its fi fty scenic acres, which he continued to view as a good

investment, but at the underlying life- changing decision to leave

the NYPD and take his pension at the age of forty- six The nagging

question was, had he traded in his fi rst-class detective’s shield for

the horticultural duties of a would- be country squire too soon?

Certain ominous events suggested that he had Since relocating

to their pastoral paradise, he had developed a transient tic in his

left eyelid To his chagrin and Madeleine’s distress, he had started

smoking again sporadically after fi fteen years of abstinence And, of

course, there was the elephant in the room—his decision to involve

himself the previous autumn, a year into his supposed retirement,

in the horrifi c Mellery murder case

He’d barely survived that experience, had even endangered

Madeleine in the process, and in the moment of clarity that a close

encounter with death often provides, he had for a while felt

moti-vated to devote himself fully to the simple pleasures of their new

rural life But there’s a funny thing about a crystal- clear image of

the way you ought to live If you don’t actively hang on to it every

day, the vision rapidly fades A moment of grace is only a moment

of grace Unembraced, it soon becomes a kind of ghost, a pale

reti-nal image receding out of reach like the memory of a dream,

reced-ing until it becomes eventually no more than a discordant note in

the undertone of your life

Understanding this process, Gurney discovered, does not

pro-vide a magic key to reversing it—with the result that a kind of

halfheartedness was the best attitude toward the bucolic life that he

could muster It was an attitude that put him out of sync with his

wife It also made him wonder whether anyone could ever really

change or, more to the point, whether he could ever change In his

darker moments, he was disheartened by the arthritic rigidity of his

own way of thinking, his own way of being.

S H U T Y O U R E Y E S T I G H T 7

The bulldozer situation was a good example He’d bought a small, old, used one six months earlier, describing it to Madeleine

as a practical tool appropriate to their proprietorship of fi fty acres

of woods and meadows and a quarter- mile- long dirt driveway He

saw it as a means of making necessary landscaping repairs and

positive improvements—a good and useful thing She seemed to

see it from the beginning, however, not as a vehicle promising his

greater involvement in their new life but as a noisy, diesel- stinking

symbol of his discontent—his dissatisfaction with their

environ-ment, his unhappiness with their move from the city to the

moun-tains, his control freak’s mania for bulldozing an unacceptable new

world into the shape of his own brain She’d articulated her

objec-tion only once, and briefl y at that: “Why can’t you just accept all

this around us as a gift, an incredibly beautiful gift, and stop trying

to fi x it?”

As he stood at the glass doors, uncomfortably recalling her com-ment, hearing its gently exasperated tone in his mind’s ear, her

ac-tual voice intruded from somewhere behind him

“Any chance you’ll get to my bike brakes before tomorrow?”

“I said I would.” He took another sip of his coffee and winced

It was unpleasantly cold He glanced at the old regulator clock over

the pine sideboard He had nearly an hour free before he had to

leave to deliver one of his occasional guest lectures at the state police

academy in Albany

“You should come with me one of these days,” she said, as though the idea had just occurred to her

“I will,” he said—his usual reply to her periodic suggestions that he join her on one of her bike rides through the rolling

farm-land and forest that constituted most of the western Catskills He

turned toward her She was standing in the doorway of the dining

area in worn tights, a baggy sweatshirt, and a paint- stained baseball

hat Suddenly he couldn’t help smiling

“What?” she said, cocking her head

“Nothing.” Sometimes her presence was so instantly charming that it emptied his mind of every tangled, negative thought She

was that rare creature: a very beautiful woman who seemed to care

J O H N V E R D O N

8

very little about how she looked She came over and stood next to

him, surveying the outdoors

“The deer have been at the birdseed,” she said, sounding more

amused than annoyed

Across the lawn three shepherd’s- crook fi nch feeders had been

tugged far out of plumb Gazing at them, he realized that he shared,

at least to some extent, Madeleine’s benign feelings toward the deer

and whatever minor damage they caused—which seemed peculiar,

since his feelings were entirely different from hers concerning the

depredations of the squirrels who even now were consuming the seed

the deer had been unable to extract from the bottoms of the

feed-ers Twitchy, quick, aggressive in their movements, they seemed

mo-tivated by an obsessive rodent hunger, an avariciously concentrated

desire to consume every available speck of food

His smile evaporating, Gurney watched them with a low- level

edginess that in his more objective moments he suspected was

be-coming his refl exive reaction to too many things—an edginess that

arose from and highlighted the fault lines in his marriage

Mad-eleine would describe the squirrels as fascinating, clever,

resource-ful, awe- inspiring in their energy and determination She seemed

to love them as she loved most things in life He, on the other hand,

wanted to shoot them

Well, not shoot them, exactly, not actually kill or maim them,

but maybe thwack them with an air pistol hard enough to knock

them off the fi nch feeders and send them fl eeing into the woods

where they belonged Killing was not a solution that ever appealed

to him In all his years in the NYPD, in all his years as a homicide

detective, in twenty- fi ve years of dealing with violent men in a

vio-lent city, he had never drawn his gun, had hardly touched it outside

a fi ring range, and he had no desire to start now Whatever it was

that had drawn him to police work, that had wed him to the job for

so many years, it surely wasn’t the appeal of a gun or the deceptively

simple solution it offers

He became aware that Madeleine was watching him with that

curious, appraising look of hers—probably guessing from the

tight-ness in his jaw his thoughts about the squirrels In response to her

apparent clairvoyance, he wanted to say something that would

S H U T Y O U R E Y E S T I G H T 9

justify his hostility to the fl uffy- tailed rats, but the ringing of the

phone intervened—in fact, the ringing of two phones intervened

simultaneously, the wired phone in the den and his own cell phone

on the kitchen sideboard Madeleine headed for the den Gurney

picked up the cell

C h a p t e r 2

The butchered bride

drank too much and viewed just about everything in life as

a sour joke He had few enthusiastic admirers and did not readily inspire trust Gurney was convinced that if all of

Hard-wick’s questionable motives were removed, he wouldn’t have any

motives left

But Gurney also considered him one of the smartest, most

in-sightful detectives he’d ever worked with So when he put the phone

to his ear and heard that unmistakable sandpaper voice, it generated

some mixed feelings

“Davey boy!”

Gurney winced He was not a Davey- boyish kind of guy, never

would be, which he assumed was the precise reason Hardwick had

chosen that particular sobriquet

“What can I do for you, Jack?”

The man’s braying laugh was as annoying and irrelevant as

ever “When we were working on the Mellery case, you used to brag

about getting up with the chickens Just thought I’d call and see if

it was true.”

There was a certain amount of banter one always had to endure

before Hardwick would deign to get to the issue at hand

“What do you want, Jack?”

“You got any actual live chickens on that farm of yours, running

around clucking and shitting, or is that ‘up with the chickens’ just

some kind of folksy saying?”

“What do you want, Jack?”

S H U T Y O U R E Y E S T I G H T 1 1

“Why the hell would I want anything? Can’t one old buddy just call another old buddy for old times’ sake?”

“Shove the ‘old buddy’ crap, Jack, and tell me why you’re calling.”

Again the braying laugh “That’s so cold, Gurney, so cold.”

“Look I haven’t had my second cup of coffee yet You don’t get

to the point in the next fi ve seconds, I hang up Five four

three two one ”

“Debutante bride got whacked at her own wedding Thought you might be interested.”

“Why would I be interested in that?”

“Shit, how could an ace homicide detective not be interested?

Did I say she got ‘whacked’? Should’ve said ‘hacked.’ Murder weapon

was a machete.”

“The ace is retired.”

There was a loud, prolonged bray

“No joke, Jack I’m really retired.”

“Like you were when you leaped in to solve the Mellery case?”

“That was a temporary detour.”

“Is that a fact?”

“Look, Jack ” Gurney was losing patience

“Okay You’re retired I got it Now give me two minutes to ex-plain the opportunity here.”

“Jack, for the love of Christ ”

“Two lousy minutes Two You’re so fucking busy massaging your retirement golf balls you can’t spare your old partner two minutes?”

The image triggered the tiny tic in Gurney’s eyelid “We were never partners.”

“How the hell can you say that?”

“We worked on a couple of cases together We weren’t partners.”

If he were to be completely honest about it, Gurney would have

to admit that he and Hardwick did have, in at least one respect,

a unique relationship Ten years earlier, working in jurisdictions a

hundred miles apart on different aspects of the same murder case,

they had individually discovered separate halves of the victim’s

sev-ered body That sort of serendipity in detection can forge a strong, if

bizarre, bond